Vocabulary Integration Reexamined

Several thesauri have been published in various domains, or in the same subject domain. This heterogeneity caused the significant incompatibility of transferring or sharing data among different systems and databases. Therefore, thesaurus integration is a solution for handling this incompatibility issue. To achieve interoperability between different thesauri, mapping systems have been developed for establishing equivalents between terms in different thesauri. However, there is still ambiguity in term semantics and hierarchical relations used in thesauri. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the issues and challenges in vocabulary mapping and integration between different controlled vocabulary systems. The paper outlines the history of the study of vocabulary mapping efforts and suggests a way in which the emerging practices on semantic issues and mapping problems can be articulated

Authority Services in Global Information Spaces - A requirements analysis and feasibility study

The global access to a variety of heterogeneous information sources world-wide gives raise to new requirements for advanced access methods and the conceptual compatibility between those systems. We regard the usage of thesauri as a key feature to achieve the logical integration. Thesauri are not seen as passive dictionaries, but as active, evolving components in the network, as "authority services", which are continuously adapted to the needs of the users and the systems requesting authority service. The integration and adaption requires communication and coordination between information sources, their maintainers, authority services and thesaurus providers. We investigate the feasibility from a computer science point of view, proposing a general architecture, and establishing functional specifications for the authority service on the level of data management, data exchange interfaces and user interface. 1. Introduction Traditional libraries could base and target their retrieval struct..